Space-craft

I am actually a big fan of Lovecraftian horror. The alternate dimension beings that are right in front of us, but we can’t see them trope is something I have enjoyed reading and seeing both in movies and video games. So I was excited to check out Moons of Madness when I was asked to review it. It has been out on PC for a while and it now comes to the consoles. While I see where they were going with the entire experience, it falls a little flat with a few too many ideas and some clunky controls that hold the game back from being the next Amnesia.

The game takes place in the future on a Mars colony. Players take control of one of the astronauts that works for a corporation known as Orochi, named Shane. To start with, Shane is going through his regular day trying to keep up the day-to-day maintenance on the station, but quickly things start to get strange for him as he starts seeing things that may or may not be there.

MSRP: $29.99
Price I’d pay: $15
Platforms: PC, XB1, PS4

With many games in this vein, the gameplay is rather simple. Solve a few problems/puzzles to progress, run from enemies a la Amnesia, and keep moving forward to progress the story. The only big change here is that Shane has the ability to scan things in the environment.This both gives story context as well as hints or new interactions when solving puzzles or completing tasks.
While Shane is interacting with certain other residents of the Mars station, it also feels like he is pretty much alone. Players never see anyone other than the evil tentacle enemies throughout the majority of the game, and the other people that are there one may not want to run into anyway.

The issue comes from things that are barely explored in the story either from the other people on the radio or from the number of topics brought up. While I wanted to know what exactly lead to the station having its own DOOM simulation occurring, it was given very piecemeal in a game that could easily be finished in around five hours. Along with all that, the game had some bugs that would pop up occasionally; I would get stuck during a gameplay cut scene and end up dying for no real reason, or the fact that being chased by enemies could be remedied by just running to another room really quickly. It has atmosphere, but sometimes would be ruined by the hiccups that occurred. Also, Shane really needs to work on some calisthenics. His run speed is a lot slower than I would have liked.

Maybe this is strange of me, but I found the mundane tasks that were presented in the first couple of hours to be the most fun I had while playing. Having to keep up the station and reroute the flooding garden area was actually fun to me. Then the monsters started coming for me and that went down the drain. Although, there was a really neat section where I had to hide from some robots trying to kill me and I could use Shane’s scanner to hack into them. It was a short-lived section, but it was clever and decently executed.

Performance-wise, it was fine. There were a few times I would get some screen tearing, but I never had any slowdown or frame rate issues, and essentially, the game looked pretty great in 4K on the Xbox One X.

In the end, I think Moons of Madness is an ok game that could have used a little more fine tuning with both the story and the horror/survival mechanics. I would never say this is a bad game by any means, but it is most certainly a forgettable one. I feel like I have seen something like this before in multiple other games and remember them much more than I did this one. At the same time, if you’re looking for a horror game that has some interesting mechanics at times and some decent atmosphere, I would at least wait for a price drop, but would consider this if you haven’t tried it.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.